Kristy Short

Ed.D

Kristy Short, Ed.D, is president of rwc360 LLC (rwc360.com)—a firm dedicated to providing professional branding, marketing, and public relations services exclusively to the accounting profession. She is also a professor of English and marketing. Reach her at kristy@rwc360.com.

Of all the assets your business owns, your brand is one of the most valuable and the most elusive. Without a strong brand identity, your firm is like a wallflower at the prom, sitting in the margins without a story or a voice to tell it.

When you think of marketing as simply “communicating,” it immediately feels doable. The fact is that many firms already have a marketing program in place, because marketing is really just communicating.

Darrell Layman made a bold move this year, and at the riskiest time: tax season. With a broad vision to significantly increase workflow efficiency across his firm, he transitioned from a desktop document management system to the cloud.

Proactive Beats Reactive Every Time
From the August 2011 Issue
Here’s the reality. Most accounting professionals, when it comes to marketing, are highly reactive. They’ve developed some good content, have a few pieces of collateral on hand...

Freed Maxick & Battaglia (FMB) didn’t become a Top 100 firm by avoiding change. In fact, the firm can best be described as the most rapid of rapid adopters — just all in good time. This is not meant to confuse anyone, but is testament to FMB’s...

The Fuoco Group isn’t your average tax and accounting firm. On one hand, you have the quirky and out-of-the-accounting-box “shall we dance” marketing theme, and on the other you have a collective expertise that spans a broad accounting repertoire...

Marketing is all about making a name for your business, and making a name requires telling a great story. You may have the most progressive and unique firm in the world, but that won’t do you a bit of good if you don’t know how to convey that to...

Trade shows remain a viable marketing option for accounting firms, yet many practitioners still don’t see the value. The fact is that if the appropriate level of planning is applied, trades shows can prove exceptionally successful in terms of lead...

If you haven’t heard of the YOUtility concept, you are missing out on the most important marketing concept of the mobile age. YOUtility is a new way of marketing your firm’s services that enables you to become inherently and genuinely useful to...

The owners of Mattingly Zsebe, PA weren’t any different from most practitioners in terms of how they viewed marketing. In essence, “Marketing sucked…it didn’t work…it was a waste of time.” These were the sentiments of the partners, Bill...

Accountants tend to fall in the analytical-left brain-thinker camp. This makes it difficult for some practitioners to make the transition to right brain creative thinking when the time comes to get a marketing program up and running.

The ongoing confusion within the profession about how social media effectively supports marketing and sales efforts is valid. While there is ample high-level educational content on the topic of social media, there are few strategies that are proven...

Content marketing is today’s hot topic. You certainly can’t ignore it (not that you want to)—with countless articles on hand that tout the importance of developing useful, timely content to support a strong marketing program.

A client newsletter is one of the most effective ways to ‘speak’ to your clients. A newsletter not only provides a regularly scheduled touch (or contact), which makes your clients feel connected to you, it also builds loyalty and drives sales.

Marketing requires planning. The jump-in-head-first approach rarely works because it does not make room for thoughtful up-front preparation. A little concentrated focus and adequate planning of any marketing initiative will save you the frustration...